Waiting on God

Psalm 25:3 “none who wait for you shall be put to shame”.

We are a culture of people who are in a hurry. We do not like to wait and we have many “conveniences” that cater to that impatience.

In Christian circles, the temptation, in the face of many good desires to see good things happen in the lives of Christians and the world at large, is to run ahead of God and convince ourselves that our timing is His. We can be so anxious for good things to happen that we do not wait for God in the biblical sense of the term.

It is not easy for us to wait on God. There will be those who voice the concern that we are not called to sit around and wait for a voice from God before we do anything – and this is true. God leads those who are active. Waiting on God is not inactivity. It is contentment doing what God has called us to do and not attempting to do what only He can do.

This is where many fine intending Christians go awry. They end up orchestrating converts, membership additions, baptismal candidates … . There is much that goes on in the Christian church, particularly in the evangelical wing of the church, that is done simply because people did not know what it meant to wait on God. We do well to understand the concept, for the Bible speaks much about it, and we do well to never transgress into God’s territory when He has given us so much to do in our own.

Waiting on God is a feeding of the soul. It is contentment. It is freedom from the frenetic. It is faith at work. We neglect it to our own spiritual hurt.